Re: modern desktop update recommendations?

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 8:17 AM MLH <mlh%goathill.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> My ~10 yr old i3-based box needs to be updated. I can't compile
> anything nontrivial without the box rebooting anymore. I am far
> out of the loop on what NetBSD can run on these days. I have a
> Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 that works very well and can use it and
> I would like to go with ssd as my old hds are starting to fail.
> My current motherboard is supposed to support (an early version
> of) efi but I never could get it to work. I suspect it only booted
> off of efi dvds and not hds.
>
> Huge numbers of choices these days but does anyone have recommendations
> on moderately-priced options that work well with NetBSD?

I've got a server that has existed since 1.4.2. I get all of this that
you're talking about. I just slowly upgrade hardware over time,
probably the same as you. It's a dual core Celeron with 8 gigs of
memory at the moment. I've been using rsync and dump/restore to move
to new disks. High quality SSDs are really cheap as long as you don't
need a lot of space. Like $30-40 for a 500 gig?

I accidentally "upgraded" from i386 to amd64 when I went to NetBSD-9.
Even that went relatively smoothly.

I'm looking hard at moving to something arm64 based. Maybe a pi4 or a
Rock64 or something. NetBSD seems to run pretty well on these.

I don't have specific advice unfortunately. Most everything I try just works.

Andy